Music legend, Lionel Richie, has also become a startup investor, joining the league of superstars who are investing in black young startup companies. Richie’s first investment is healthcare startup, Heal.
“Because developing a doctor-on-demand service that would allow personalized medical visits, booked through an app on a user’s phone is exactly what a new healthcare startup should do,” Richie told TechCrunch. Especially one that only charges $99 per visit.
The startup he is investing in offered a return to the quality healthcare he was used to growing up in the small town of Tuskegee, AL.
“If you’re born and raised in Alabama in a small, tight-knit community, you know all the doctors, you know all the nurses… No one said meet me at the office at 8 o clock in the morning and wait.”
Instead, doctors would come to a home and diagnose and treat a patient.
The idea that technology and a new business model could be used to bring back a degree of service that has been long-gone from the U.S. healthcare system struck a chord with Richie.
“When I met with Nick, he said ‘Here’s the pitch: we want to bring back affordable healthcare with doctors coming to the house in less than two hours,” Richie said of his first meeting with Heal founder Nick Desai. “And I said… are you kidding me… from there it was pretty much a question of how could he pull this off? And when I realized they had actually pulled off the logistics of it, that was it… It was pretty much what I love.”
